


A World Without You

by Kedreeva



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Delusions, Gen, Grief, Hallucinations, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 13:54:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13637613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kedreeva/pseuds/Kedreeva
Summary: Written after seeingthis metaby SublimeGlass.Dream AU: Scott died the night Stiles coaxed him into the woods on a police hunt. Stiles copes by wrapping his world in delusions and bringing Scott back as a werewolf.





	A World Without You

            He knows this is not a one-time nightmare, not a one-off event.

            He knows it is not a dream, not something which can be dispelled with a shake of his shoulder or the call of his name.

            He knows he is not asleep.

            He knows it as his reality, but he does not know that it is not real.

            When he thinks about the night he went out to the forest with Scott, he remembers how dark it was, how there was a bit of drizzle but not enough to be off-putting. He remembers Scott’s little red inhaler, clasped in his hand, and the way his breath rasped in his chest. There were flashing lights as the police combed the area and the sound of his dad’s voice calling him out from where he and Scott crouched. He can clearly see the look Scott gives him, the one that says _if your dad drives me home in the cruiser’s backseat one more time I’m dead_. Stiles takes the sentiment for granted. He can feel the warmth of Scott’s shoulder in the rain as he clasps it firmly before joining his father.

            What he doesn’t remember is the phone call that night from Scott’s mother while she looks for him. He doesn’t remember the police report about the animal attack. Though his father sat him down and asked him when he’d last seen Scott, and he answers that Scott was at home studying, he denies it. He doesn’t recognize that the shredded body in the woods belongs to his best friend. He cannot go through that again; not after his mother.

            It wasn’t Scott in the morgue, even though he went to see. It was a only girl, part of her anyway, and he doesn’t understand why everyone says it is Scott. It’s not. So he goes to school that Monday, and Scott shows him the bloody bandage over his hip and tells him it was definitely a wolf. He tells Stiles he found the rest of the body, and Stiles smiles because if they can find the other half, he can show them it’s not Scott.

            When they go that afternoon, they don’t find the body- but they do find Derek Hale. Stiles remembers Derek, remembers the secret crush he harbored so many years ago, before the fire drove Derek away from Beacon Hills. He is glad Derek has returned, and glad that he has found Scott’s inhaler. Stiles hangs onto it so Scott won’t lose it again. He doesn’t realize that Derek isn’t really there, that he never really came back from New York. He blanks out that it was his own fingers that lifted the inhaler from the leaves near the bloodstain on the forest floor.

            He is proud of himself for figuring it out first; for figuring out that Scott isn’t dead because Scott is now a werewolf. Of course he can see how people may have mistaken it. There was a bite wound, but it healed, and Scott is fine even if he has some issues on the full moon. It helps him, Stiles thinks. It makes Scott’s senses better and it makes him better at lacrosse, and it helps him attract Allison.

            She hangs around them a lot, and Stiles blames it on the fact that she is dating Scott now. He doesn’t seem to recall that she was his own girlfriend first, and she doesn’t talk about it because it upsets him. She just holds his hand and tells him it’s not his fault. He doesn’t know what she means. He thinks it’s horrible that Matt starts stalking her and putting himself into the pictures with Photoshop afterward. No one tells him that Allison has left him for Matt because she doesn’t know how to help Stiles any more.

            Stiles blames Matt for things he cannot even put into words. He misses Allison though he cannot say why. He tells Scott there is a kanima, and Scott and Derek agree it must be stopped. If it turns out to be Jackson so that Stiles can have a chance to talk to Lydia more, it’s only because that makes the most sense to him. He watches Lydia from across the room, from across the cafeteria, while she sits in the bleachers at matches… he watches her every chance he gets and he fabricates conversations he believes actually happen. He sends Jackson away to London when summer begins, because Lydia will just not stop talking to him and Stiles needs her attention instead.

            Sometimes, a lot of times really, he goes to Scott’s house to see him and to talk about all of this. Scott’s mother gives him this look, and asks if he’s all right. He blocks out the times she’s tried to explain to him that Scott is gone, until the day when she gives up as well. Now she lets him in and he goes to Scott’s room, and sometimes she stands in the doorway watching him move things and talk to himself - to Scott - and sometimes she doesn’t. He doesn’t see her cleaning up when he is gone, or the way she sits on the edge of Scott’s bed and hugs one of his pillows and lets the tears roll down her cheeks because she thinks it feels so much like she lost them both.

            Sometimes he shows up in the middle of the night, and it freaks her out at first. She catches him in Scott’s room wheeling around in his desk chair talking about werewolves. She’s caught him a dozen times since the attack, and now she just calls his father and lets him know where Stiles is. After a bit, his father shows up and Stiles’ eyes glaze over and he goes very still and they both know he’ll forget it by morning.

            He gets concerned when Peter begins to take an interest in Scott’s mother. He’s a werewolf, and Stiles tries to save her from him. When she goes for her first date with him, Stiles hits the car and desperately does his best to ensure she is not left alone with him. He cannot let her be hurt; Scott would be crushed if anything happened to his mother. When he has been taken home, Melissa apologizes to Peter and Stiles mistakes her crying in the car later as loneliness. In his world, Peter turns his attention away from Melissa and onto Stiles, to keep her safe. In reality, Peter leaves both their lives.

            His father still tries. Every morning, he tries, over breakfast. It’s exhausting and it upsets Stiles and he thinks maybe it will never really work. So he brings Stiles to his sessions with the psychiatrist, Ms. Morrell, where they talk about death and imagining things that are not real but she can tell he doesn’t apply them to himself. She’s nice, and she works with him, and she gets closer than anyone to getting Stiles to talk about it. She doesn’t get close enough. He begins to think she’s involved.

            His friends at school stop talking to him, so he begins to talk to kids that sometimes do and sometimes don’t exist. He talks to Erica, who has seizures and climbs walls and has never actually been to school. He steals the keys to the ice rink and invents deals with Vernon Boyd, the kid who sits alone at lunch and rides the bus to school, except that no one’s ever heard of him before. When summer hits and there is no climbing wall or cafeteria, he hangs missing posters for them with Derek Hale’s number; a number which goes to nowhere.

            Isaac isn’t his friend. Isaac is the one that Scott befriends, who begins to replace Stiles. He’s offended at first, because he doesn’t want to be replaced. Scott was - is - his best friend, and there is nothing in the world that can take him away from Stiles. Not Derek, not Peter, not Allison or kanimas or alphas. Except Isaac starts to, and Stiles begins to think maybe it’s okay to let go a little.

            To cope with it, he spends more time with Derek, which means spending time with Peter, even though neither of them are actually there. Their nonexistence does nothing to lessen Stiles’ old crush on Derek; if anything, it draws him back more often. The loft is abandoned, enough that no one will find him when he begins spending most of his time there and talking about the werewolves with which he has populated his world. No one is there to tell him any differently, and it escalates.

            He brings Heather home to Beacon Hills, despite that she left four years ago when his mother died. Their moms had been best friends and Heather’s mom couldn’t bear to stay where she had lost so much. They moved and they never came back, but that doesn’t mean that they have to stay gone, too. So she returns, but she is more happiness for Stiles than his guilt can allow, and so she is taken from him. No one can tell him where she is, though he expects she has been hurt, like the rest of the good things in his life. But when Stiles goes to the hospital to look, Melissa takes him to the morgue to cool off someplace no one can hear him talking to himself. He sees the bodies on the empty tables, sees _her_ body, and he knows the pattern is that they are virgins; his father likes patterns. Patterns he can understand and solve.

            What he cannot grasp is the way his mind has begun attempting to cope. It is trying to speak to him in the only manner through which it can; it feeds healing into his delusions. It sends him a pack of alphas to destroy the false friendships he has created with the betas, to rid him of Scott and Derek and Peter. It sacrifices virgins because Scott was innocent to Stiles. It gives him dead warriors because there are some battles Stiles cannot win. If he cannot snap out of it, his subconscious will remind him that he has survived loss before, and it will do so by sacrificing mothers next.

            Stiles doesn’t like where this is going. He knows something is not right, even if he cannot put his thumb on it. He can see that his life is affecting his father, and eventually he has no choice. He has to tell him what is going on, before his father is hurt any more. He doesn’t see that it’s his own inability to cope, his delusions, his panic attacks, that are causing his father pain.

            “It’s werewolves,” he tells his father. “Scott was bitten, and Derek is raising a pack to fight the alphas.“

            He doesn’t understand the sad, tired look his father gives him when he says: “Scott is dead, Stiles. He died nine months ago in an animal attack.”

            And Stiles thought they were past this, he always thinks they are past this. “No, dad, he’s not. He’s just a werewolf now, see? He got bitten, but he’s okay. This is important! There are werewolves running around killing people.“

            "No, son,” his father tells him, scrubbing at one eye with the heel of his hand. Stiles can’t remember how the tumbler of whiskey got into his father’s hand. “There are no werewolves.“

            Stiles feels the crush of betrayal at the words, and he cannot meet his father’s eyes. “Mom would’ve believed me,” he answers quietly. He goes to his room and they won’t speak for two days.

            He lays on his bed that night and he thinks about everything, and he knows it is not a dream, not a nightmare. Scott perches at the end of the bed, watching him without saying a word, and Stiles knows he is not asleep. He can see the brown of Scott’s eyes, hear the rasp of his breath in the cool night air in the woods, feel the warmth of his shoulder beneath his hand even when they are not touching.

            Looking away from Scott and he scrubs his palm on the linens like he can feel the blood still coating his skin from the day he found the body.

            It’s not a dream.

            He wishes he could wake up.


End file.
